The cable

CIS stayed on, living on the surface of her little native city. Miss Braithwaite was still in California; she wrote that she could not tell how long she might be detained; it seemed probable that it would be for all of the winter, or its greater part. Her friend was dying slowly in the lingering agonies of the most agonizing of all diseases; she clung to Miss Braithwaite, praying her not to leave her, and Miss Braithwaite had promised to stay to help her to die. Cis suspected it was also to teach her how to die; that she was less versed than Miss Braithwaite in the science of the saints.

With Miss Braithwaite gone, Cis had no desire to return to Beaconhite; it was not the place, it was that home and its mistress for which Cis longed, for the lack of which she felt lost.

Mr. Singer had found out that Cicely Adair had returned, and he hunted her up, imploring her to take up his work with his telephone girls, help to organize the measures which he was trying to put on foot for their welfare. Cis agreed to undertake this work, but only with the understanding that she was free to lay it down at any time. Her experience under Miss Braithwaite, in Father Morley’s Girls’ Club, in the many good works which occupied her Beaconhite friends, stood Cis in good stead now; she did well with Mr. Singer’s girls, and was interested in them. It was strange and amusing to have gone away, dismissed by the Telephone Company for a breach of law, and return to be placed over their employees’ pretty rooms for recreation and rest, installed as the hostess, friend and guide of these girls.

Cis visited Jeanette Lucas often; the two girls were strongly drawn to each other; their friendship deepened and grew. Jeanette had come out of her trial with a darkened outlook upon life. Cis had come out of her struggle and loss undismayed, strengthened, in a sense refreshed, reaping the reward of her choice. Although there were moments when a simple tune whistled by a boy in the street, a phrase, a half resemblance stabbed her with pain, yet Cis was able truthfully to tell Nan that she was happy. By temperament and will she was framed to look forward, not back. Her optimistic courage was inspiring to Jeanette; she grew fond of Cis and turned to her as to a tonic, a summons to do her best also.

Nan was submerged in her house, in its master and little Matt. She paid Cis her old loving worship, raised to an incalculable degree by her reverence for Cis as for one who had given her proofs, but there was no time in any day to spare for anyone but Joe and Matt. Nan and Cis met in the baby more intimately, more frequently than in each other, outside this powerful little downy link.

To her amazement, Cis discovered herself a baby worshiper; she had not known that she was a member of that order, in one of its highest degrees.

Her godson was to her hardly less adorable than to his mother. She hung over him, absorbing his violet-scented, milky sweetness as the odor of a flower; brooding over the miracle of his tiny features, their curious twistings, the crooked smile of his sucked-in lips; the funny thrusts of his absurdities of hands, doubled into fists and taking her in the eye, or letting her mumble them with kisses that inclosed the wrinkles of his wrists, the blue-blue veins traced below the whiteness of the backs of those belligerent little hands. When he looked into her eyes and laughed aloud, clutching her wealth of hair, Cis was elated, humbled, flattered. In baby Matt she found a new joy that revealed her to herself; she knew now what she had renounced when she had gone out of that pretty apartment, leaving Rodney there amid the ruins of his hopes and hers. Not for an instant did she regret, turn back in thought upon her right course, but she understood the void which ached in her, and often the baby’s fine white tiny yoke was damp when his godmother raised her face from it, while he was gurgling with laughter because she had burrowed into his neck, tickling him.

Cis boarded with Nan. “Of course you couldn’t so much as think of living anywhere else, as long as I have room for you and want you so dreadfully! Besides, there’s baby!” Nan had said, and there was nothing to bring against her brief, convincing arguments.

“It isn’t as though I were going to be here permanently,” Cis said. “I think no one ought permanently to live with a married friend, but just till I go back to Beaconhite—or whatever I do next—I suppose it won’t be too hard on you, Mrs. Nan!”

Tom Dowling was a model of fraternal devotion after Cis was installed under Nan’s roof; he made opportunities to visit his sister to an incredible degree.

“Good old Tommy is a dear boy, but I wonder if he really thinks I don’t see through him!” Nan cried.

“Paraffine paper is thick beside his transparency; you’d be more than blind to miss seeing through him,” Joe answered.

Tom brought extraordinary things to the baby, toys which would require two more years of life for him to handle—a whipping top is not adapted to a boy two months old, nor is a tin locomotive run by sand that flows upon its wheels from a revolving sieve, hidden in its smokestack.

“Oh, Tommy, why, why!” Nan sighed one day when Tom produced a large cow, with a realistic moo when its head was moved, from a large package beneath his arm.

“He’ll grow to it; something to cut his ambition on, same’s you give him that bone thing to chew on for his teeth,” explained Tom, unabashed.

“Tom’s really a dear, Cis,” Nan said that night after Tom had gone home. “Mother is perfectly delighted that he has stuck to you so; she used to hope he’d see Louise Müller, a neighbor’s daughter, but he never did. Now mother is worrying for fear you won’t care about him. Do you think that you ever could, Cis darling? Of course all these cows, and tops and engines are not for baby; they’re for you, same as the candy is.”

“I don’t seem to enjoy the cow any more than Matt does; must I play with it, Nan? Tom didn’t offer it to me,” Cis sighed.

“Not directly. I mean they’re all intended to make you notice him. I’d almost die of joy, Cis, if you were my sister!” cried Nan.

“Adopt me, Nannie. We can make it as effectual, and I’m afraid it’s the only way,” Cis suggested. “Don’t look cast-down; Tom will be all right, and it’s better to have him imagine he cares about me than to be growing up without an object. He’ll find the right girl later, and in the mean time it keeps him safe for her.”

“Growing up! He’s as old as you are, or so nearly it comes to the same thing!” cried Nan. “You don’t take Tom seriously, but he takes himself—and you—seriously enough.”

“Boys do,” said Cis. “Don’t fuss, little grandmother; it’s enough to be a mother and bring up Matt. He’s learning to love me, too, by the way!”

As the days passed, however, Cis began to take Tom more seriously; he began to be a burden on her mind. He dogged her footsteps; wherever she went Tom turned up. He watched for chances to do her small services, carried out her least suggestions, modelled himself upon the advice which she had given him when she had first come back, before she realized that she must not let him conform himself to her ideas, before she began to look upon him as anything more than Tommy Dowling, Nan’s honest and likable boy-brother.

“If only Miss Braithwaite would come back!” thought Cis. “I’d go away and he’d do something sensible with himself! All I can do now is to hold him down, and hold him off, but I’m really beginning to be afraid it’s bad for him.”

One bright, frosty afternoon, when the earth was white and the sky brilliantly blue, Cis went off alone to walk in the park. A homesick spell was upon her; she was homesick for Miss Braithwaite, for the shadowy library and its glowing hearth; for Mr. Lucas’ office and its interests, the clever, keen men who came there talking of great matters; her sense of being part of a world moved by levers hidden in that office. And she wondered why it was that for some time she had heard no word of Anselm Lancaster. He had written her several pleasant letters, had sent her a book at Christmas that was a delight to brain and eye. He had wished her a Happy New Year with a graceful note and a lovely little Florentine print in colors, framed in dull, dark, carved wood; a Botticelli Madonna surrounded by square-chinned, deep-eyed angels in tunics, upon which their square-trimmed locks fell at shoulder length, while their long fingers clasped tall candles that revealed to the world a Babe upon His Mother’s knee.

There was growing in Cicely a discontent that she could not down; she grappled with it, hating it, for no mood had ever mastered her, nor greatly annoyed her heretofore, and this restlessness was annoying; it got between her and her daily life; her prayers; between her and herself, her true self, brave and blithe and courageous. She wanted to walk briskly in the pretty park and think out what was wrong with her, take herself to task, and scotch the head of this miserable little asp gnawing at her. But hardly had she gone half the width of the park, its longest way, than there was Tom Dowling, coming rapidly toward her, his face illumined, his right arm saluting her.

“Oh, me!” sighed Cis inwardly. “Who wants a human being omnipresent? Hello, Tom!” she said aloud. “How do you happen to be here at a time when all honest folk are at work?”

“Nothing dishonest about me, Cis,” said Tom, joining her and turning to walk beside her as a matter of course. “Why, I got the afternoon, and I went to the house. Nan said you’d gone to the park. I went around the other way; thought you’d take the north gate. Anyhow, I’ve found you!”

The satisfaction in Tom’s voice was complete.

“Yes, Tom, but—” Cis hesitated.

“You’d rather be by yourself?” cried poor Tom. “Oh, Cis, you’ve played fair with me! You’re nice to me, but you’re nothing more. I won’t be able to blame you, but if you won’t love me, what under the heavens shall I do? Say, Cis, love me, can’t you? I’m not such a much, but I ain’t so bad, honest! I don’t care how far you hunt, you won’t find anything I’ve done to be ashamed of. I ain’t fit for you lots of ways; you’ve got kind of fine ladified, though I don’t mean you put on. You’re it, that’s all! But I’m not a bad chap, that’s straight, and if I was I’d tell you; I wouldn’t fool you for a kingdom. I’m getting on; I make thirty now, and two people could live on fifteen hundred, easy—and the sixty dollars would buy us each some clothes, and theatre tickets, or something! And I’ll have more soon. My boss makes a point of boosting married men—oh, gosh! A married man! Married to you, Cis! Say, Cis, don’t you think you could see it, if you looked hard enough? Love me, I mean?”

“Tom, dear,” said Cis a little wistfully, for the honest boy’s voice shook, and his eyes were as imploring as a dog’s eyes. “I like you heaps, better than before I went away. I didn’t know you so well then, and besides you’ve come out a great deal. But I couldn’t love you, Tommy; not that way. I’m sorry, dear. You are a fine boy, and the girl who does marry you will be lucky. It never will be me, and it wouldn’t be right to let you think it ever might be. Sorry, Tom! I wish you didn’t think you wanted me. You’d be better off with someone else, and you’ll find her—”

“Cut it out!” cried Tom hoarsely. “Cut out that line of talk, Cicely Adair! You’re the greatest girl in the world. There’s no one can hold a candle to you, so cut it out! If you won’t, you won’t, but cut out all that talk. I want you, and I’ll keep on wanting you. If you don’t want me, and don’t want me so much that you know you’ll never want me, that settles it, but I want you. Oh, Cis, why can’t you want me? What is wrong with me? How can you be so infernally sure you’ll never think of it? Am I such a mess? Would you tell me why, Cis?”

Cis looked pityingly at Tom’s flushed, stormy face, listened with tender, pitying amusement to his incoherent implorations. She tried to explain.

“It’s not that there’s one thing wrong with you, Tom,” she said. “It’s I. I’m not thinking of marrying. I’ve grown years older than you are, Tom, and I’ve grown ever so far off from the old Cis whom you first knew and liked. I suppose you knew I was going to be married? I’m glad, thankfully glad that all that is over; I wouldn’t be happy now in the way I thought I’d be happy then, not with the same people, interests. But I shall never again feel as I felt then, so glad to see someone coming, so—I’m afraid it is much the way you feel to me now, Tom dear! Truly you will get over it. It leaves you changed, older, not so light-hearted, but it leaves you; it has left me. I shall never so much as think of marrying you, my nice Nan’s nice brother; yet I am fond of you, and think you’re fine.”

“I don’t want to get over it,” groaned Tom. “If I can’t marry you I can keep on loving you and that way you do sort of get a person.”

“I think we ought to try to get over it, Tom, because we’ve got to play up, not go moping along,” said Cis. “Let’s forget you love me; in that way, at least, and let’s be glad you love me, or will love me, more as you do Nan, just as I love you. It makes the world a fine place to live in when we know splendid people who are fond of us. Beaconhite, living in Miss Braithwaite’s house, rather spoiled me for other places, Tom. You’ve no idea what a library that is, and what wonderful things I heard talked of before the fire!”

“Yes, so I’ve heard you say,” growled Tom. “The old lady herself was a wonder, but how about that man, that Lancaster who was such a highbrow?”

There was no missing the implication in Tom’s wrathful voice. Cis felt her blood rush to her hair in a burning blush that rivalled the hair in brilliance, and which angered her, knowing the conclusion which Tom would draw from it. Characteristically, she grappled with the situation.

“If you mean to hint, Tom Dowling, that Mr. Lancaster was interested in me, any more than in a girl living under his old friend’s roof, or I in him, more than in the most splendid man I ever saw—except Father Morley, but priests don’t count—you’re ’way, ’way off the mark! I never once thought of such a thing as his really liking me, and you’ve got to take my word for it!”

“All right, Cis. I’d take your word for anything, and I’m fearfully glad to take it on this,” said Tom. “I’ve been jealous of that chap, but that settles it, and him. If you won’t hold out a chance to me it’s some comfort not to think someone else has a chance. I guess you’re right that Beaconhite has ruined you. If only you’d never gone! You ran into the whole thing there.”

Cis knew that Tom meant that there she had met and loved Rodney, and there had been separated from her earlier friends by the higher things to which she had grown up. It came over her with sudden force that in Beaconhite she had indeed found her fate.

She looked across the park with eyes that saw Beaconhite, the dignified street on which Miss Braithwaite lived in its most dignified house; the street where St. Francis Xavier’s church stood; the garden of its adjoining school; Father Morley’s thin figure with its drooping shoulders; the altar within the church, its lamp, her soul’s home. Beaconhite was her true home. Some day, she thought, please God, she would go back.

And then her eyes became cognizant of her present surroundings. She saw at a little distance from her, a tawdry, shabby woman sitting upon a park bench, although it was cold, and her silken clothes were thin. There was no mistaking her, even afar, for anything but one of those derelicts which sin, having floated them prosperously for a time, throws up against the barriers of civilized society to be dashed to pieces, or caught up by a pitying lifeguard, as the case may be.

As Cicely noted her, bringing her thoughts back to what was before her, the woman covertly drew something out from the sleeve of her coat, and picked at it.

A bottle! And she was pulling the cork!

Cis sprang forward and ran, not delaying for a word to Tom, flying toward the wretched being on the bench. As she reached her the woman, who had seen her fleeting toward her, raised the bottle to her lips.

Cis sprang; leaped the last lap of her race against suicide; threw herself, as a ball player throws himself against the base, and struck the woman’s elbow. The bottle fell in myriad pieces on the walk, scenting the air with the odor of peach stones. The woman crumbled up and slid to the ground. For one instant she and her rescuer were beside each other upon the walk. Then Cis regained her feet and stood looking down upon the degraded figure before her, horror, loathing, yet divine pity in her flushed face. This was the tableau which Tom, hastening after Cis, saw as he came up.

“For heaven’s sake, Cis?” he questioned her without formulating his question.

“Oh, yes, Tom, for heaven’s sake!” cried Cis. “I just made it. If the police come up and catch us, she’ll be taken in for attempted suicide. We must get her somewhere, quick.”

“Well, what if she is taken in?” Tom disgustedly asked, hating to see Cis in proximity to this woman. “She’ll be looked after by the matron.”

“Oh, no! She must be saved, if she can be. Arrest won’t save her. Can you hear me? Answer me. Were you a Catholic?” Cis asked, bending over the collapsed figure.

“Once I was,” the woman muttered.

Cis straightened herself triumphantly. “The Good Shepherd!” she cried. “Tom, help me to get her up. You poor thing, get up! We are going to take care of you. Get up.”

Tom reluctantly, yet admiring Cis, lifted the castaway, and, staggering, she made out to stand.

“Let me alone; I’m sick,” she moaned.

“Yes, we know. Try to come with us. I’m afraid a policeman will come along,” Cis urged her.

The word acted as a stimulant. “They’d run me in, vagrant, suicide,” she muttered. “What did you stop me for? I’ll get it yet.”

Slowly, Tom supporting the woman with his hands under her arms, disgust and anger on his face, while Cis walked behind, occasionally steadying the wavering figure by a hand upon her spine, they reached the confines of the small park. Cis hailed a cab; they bundled the woman into it, and Cis gave the driver his order.

“To the House of the Good Shepherd,” she said.

Then she added herself to the strange party, and the cab started.

“The Sisters won’t thank us, perhaps,” muttered Tom.

“Surely they will! There’s no bound to their charity, and no bound to hope, except death,” cried Cis. “She is desperately ill.”

“Dissipation, dope, exposure, why wouldn’t she be ill?” growled Tom. “It’s a great combination for you to hitch up to, Cis.”

“I don’t know. My guardian angel hitches up to me, and there’s more difference between me and an angel, than between this woman and me. Are you comfortable? Do you hear me speaking to you?” Cis asked.

“I hear. I heard. I don’t want to go to the Sisters; I want to die, die, die! I’ve had enough,” the woman aroused herself to say.

“Poor soul, I’m sorry!” Cis’s voice was as sweet as Nan’s when she comforted her baby. “I think you’ll be glad that we found you. Why, you’re quite young, and you were pretty!”

“Pretty! Yes, that’s so. I’m twenty-eight or nine; I don’t know—” the quavering voice trailed into silence.

“Do you remember your name? Will you tell it to me, so I can call you by it?” said Cis.

“Lots of names, lots of names; plenty names. Here I’m Pearl Molineaux. Out in ’Frisco I was Carmin Casanova. Giddy Gay—that was somewhere else; I forget. Home in Chicago I was Myrtle Moore; that’s while I was married,” the woman said, speaking slowly.

“Chicago!” “Myrtle Moore?” Cicely’s heart gave a great leap, then stood still. Could it be? She was sure that it was! She was sure that it had been given her to save from suicide Rodney’s wife.

She bent down over the woman who had sagged low in the seat of the taxicab.

“You are the wife of George Rodney Moore?” she asked.

“No. Divorced. Rod and I were divorced,” she said.

“Oh, God help me!” Cis murmured, and Tom was frightened by the pallor of her face.

“Oh, God, I’ll try! Please, help me! Help her; help me to help her!”

The cab stopped at the door of that beneficent house wherein stainless women welcome within their consecrated walls the outcasts whose stains of soul their pure hands labor to remove; wherein the virgin servants of the Good Shepherd carry back to Him His lost black sheep.

Myrtle Moore was reluctant to enter that portal, but her strength was spent, her will too enfeebled by illness to resist anyone who decided for her and forcibly executed their decisions.

Tom helped Myrtle up the steps; the Sister Portress responded to their summons on the bell, and they were shown into a small parlor, from which Cis was conducted to another reception room, where a tall nun, in the beautiful white habit of her order, came to hear from her the story of this latest rescue and petitioner for her charity.

There was no question of Myrtle’s rejection. Another nun came to take her away to the infirmary, and Cis left the convent with the promise to come regularly to inquire after Myrtle, whose condition the infirmarian at once pronounced grave. Tom took Cis’s hand and slipped it into his arm; she was trembling.

“Great old adventure, splendid Cis?” he said.

“Oh, Tom, don’t talk about it; I can’t!” Cis almost sobbed. “You don’t know how wonderful it is!”